1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the secure access of protected or privileged, private network digital material from a remote location. More particularly, the invention relates to remotely accessing protected digital material using a remotely-networked processing device and applications uploaded thereto from a portable personal communication device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multimedia content processing devices, such as video converter/decoder (set-top box) devices and other digital video recorder (DVR) devices, can be configured to perform place shifting, which allows end users to watch multimedia programming content televised or received in one location from another location. For example, an end user can access multimedia content received by or stored on a first, multimedia content processing device in a first (end user) location, via a place-shifting device located at a second (place-shifted) location. That is, an end user having a set-top box or other multimedia content processing device at home (the end user location) can access multimedia content received by and/or stored on the set-top box by a computer or other temporary hosting device at a remote location (the place-shifted location) via an appropriate network connection, such as the Internet. Alternatively, an external place-shifting device can be connected to a conventional multimedia content processing device and to a broadband network to allow an end user to watch current multimedia content (e.g., live television broadcasts) or multimedia content stored in the multimedia content device from any location that has a connection to the broadband network.
However, conventional multimedia content processing devices that provide place-shifting features, as well as place-shifting device used to access place-shifted multimedia content, typically do not provide sufficient security to protect premium multimedia content from unauthorized access. Moreover, conventional multimedia content processing devices that provide place-shifting features typically do not allow secured access to premium multimedia content from remote or place-shifted locations.